Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability

Grade Level: Middle School (6-8)

Mathematics Stimulus Considerations

Smarter Balanced uses stimulus materials to provide context or information for the item or task to which the student must respond. In mathematics, the stimulus is the text, source, and/or graphic about which the item is written. This presentation provides explanations about the use of stimuli in the creation of mathematics items and performance tasks. Information contained in this […]

Mathematics Summative Assessment Blueprint

The Mathematics Blueprint provides an overview to the types and content of items and tasks that will appear on the Smarter Balanced student test forms. The document starts with a blueprint overview, by claim, for each of grade levels 3-5, 6-8 and 11. Initial charts show the major content categories comprising each claim (for example, Concepts and Procedures), […]

Performance Tasks for English Language Arts

This presentation provides detailed performance task descriptions and examples that illustrate key performance task features that are an important part of the Smarter Balanced Assessment System. Performance tasks are designed for students to demonstrate their ability to think and reason and apply higher-order skills. In ELA performance tasks, a student reads research sources, responds to prompts, and writes […]

Practice and Training Resources

This resource site includes materials designed to acquaint users with the Smarter Balanced test platform and environment. The site includes: user guides classroom activity administration guidelines practice classroom activities scoring guides performance task writing rubrics ELA and math practice items, including Braille versions, and scoring guides are available on the resource page. Performance task writing rubrics for […]

Universal Design, Accessibility, Bias, and Sensitivity Considerations

Assessment items and tasks are designed to accurately evaluate students’ knowledge, skills, and abilities. The Smarter Balanced system of assessment has considered universal design, accessibility, bias, and sensitivity throughout the process of developing assessment items and tasks. In this presentation, viewers are provided with detailed information about: concepts of universal design and accessible assessment application of these concepts to Smarter […]

Social-Emotional Learning Assessment Measures for Middle School Youth

This report, commissioned by the Raikes Foundation, identified valid, reliable, and useable school-wide assessments for social and emotional learning to help schools and districts identify tools that could be useful in determining successful SEL programs. The authors conducted an extensive review of existing assessment tools used to measure middle school students’ SEL. Out of the 73 instruments identified and […]